


Burning Red

by LilyEllison



Series: Daylight [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Don't @ Me, Established Relationship, Foggy Nelson Is a Good Bro, Foggy's got a gun, Fratt Week 2020, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, OT3, Polyamory, Post-Canon, titC says OT3 is ok for Fratt Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:11:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24463957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilyEllison/pseuds/LilyEllison
Summary: Frank's the good husband. So where does that leave Matt?(The answer is surrounded by love.)
Relationships: Frank Castle/Karen Page, Frank Castle/Matt Murdock, Frank Castle/Matt Murdock/Karen Page, Matt Murdock & Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Matt Murdock/Karen Page
Series: Daylight [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1767028
Comments: 18
Kudos: 62
Collections: Fratt Week





	Burning Red

**Author's Note:**

> This story picks up a few months after [Daylight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22790143), with Matt, Frank and Karen in an established relationship. Reading that story is probably not necessary for this one, but it’s a lot smuttier if you enjoy that kind of thing.
> 
> Thank you to the brilliant [LadyMaigrey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyMaigrey) for her very helpful beta read. Posting for the [Fratt Week 2](https://frattweek.tumblr.com/post/619004741915148289/this-blog-is-happy-to-announce-fratt) free day.

If nothing else, at least he could hear the river. The running, rushing, rolling of it, the splashing slap and swell.

Matt let it fill his head until it surged into a chorus. Voices now. Singing.

_And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings, bear you on the breath of dawn..._

Matt would have smiled at himself, if he could have smiled. The hymn was a funeral classic. A little on the nose.

But still, he let it carry him away. The song echoed roundly through his head, just as it did when it bounced off the stone walls of his church, the harmony of the nuns in the choir loft floating down to wrap around him from all sides.

_For to His angels, He’s given a command...to guard you in all of your ways…_

“Don’t even fucking think about it, Red.”

That was _not_ the voice of an angel. Matt tried to make it go away. There was nothing but agony where the voice was, and anyway, that couldn’t be Frank.

Frank was at home. With Karen. Being the good husband — even if that wasn’t a label any of them would be comfortable using out loud yet. Frank had a talent for taking care of people. He made excellent coffee and cooked actual food and he always remembered special occasions. He liked to bring home roses, though he usually limited himself to a single stem, conscientious of Matt’s nose.

There was no way that Frank could be here tonight, jarring Matt’s body so the ethereal music in his head melted away into screaming. It was impossible.

Frank had decided he needed to stay off the streets for a while, just until he felt like he could handle himself less lethally. Matt still went out at night, of course, and he liked that he wasn’t leaving Karen to be a midnight widow anymore. But...

Sometimes he’d come home and listen to their hearts beating right next to each other, drumming a private duet under the duvet, and he’d wonder if maybe it would be better not to disturb them. Like maybe he would only throw off their rhythm.

But Frank was never actually sleeping when Matt got home. And on those nights, he’d always get up to go to the bathroom, or check the locks for the hundredth time, or do some other little unquestionable but unnecessary chore, so that when he came back to bed, Matt had to leave the edge where he’d perched stiffly and shift into the middle. And there, surrounded by warmth, by scent, by breath, he was too overwhelmed to do anything but rest.

It would be nice to sleep now. The two of them would still have each other. They could be happy.

“I mean it,” the voice that couldn’t be Frank said sternly.

And Matt found he wanted to do what the voice said. He wanted to be good. He stopped trying to get the singing back. Strangely, he couldn’t hear the screaming anymore.

But then, he couldn’t hear anything else, either.

* * *

The first thing Matt was aware of were her hands, cool and steady, guiding needle through flesh.

“Mom?” he said groggily, and the stitching stopped momentarily. That wasn’t something he called her. Not Mom. Not any derivation of mother. The word itself seemed to stick to his tongue — in some ways, around her, he would always be learning how to speak.

“Matthew, it’s Sister Maggie from Saint Agnes,” she said, in the carefully composed tones of an institutional administrator. “Please remain still while I finish this.” His leg itched as she continued, but the buzz of pain engulfing him was so consuming that it barely registered as a separate sensation.

He had a perverse impulse to try calling her “mom” again, just to provoke her, to ruffle her preternatural placidity, but he thought better of it, given that she was already stabbing him with something sharp. Still, the urge to be a pain in her neck probably boded well for his ability to pull through this.

His attention shifted away from Maggie when he heard the soft sound of Karen drawing in her breath to speak. “He’s awake,” she called out. Frank’s booted steps thudded dully across the living room.

“You scared the shit out of us, Matt,” Karen said to him, her voice wavering. His hand twitched, yearning for the comfort of hers, but he guessed she was keeping her distance to avoid getting in Maggie’s way.

Frank’s heartbeat was close now, his cotton-covered arm whispering around Karen’s silken shoulders. “What the fu—what happened?” he asked, just barely catching himself. There was a nun in the room.

“Trap,” Matt said, sounding raspier than he expected. “They were waiting for me.”

“Oh, God,” Karen said, horrified. “So it’s my fault. I shouldn’t—”

“None of that,” Frank said warningly. “Red takes his own risks.”

“You found me?” Matt asked, remembering his voice, and the singing, and the river.

“Hadn’t heard from you. Got jumpy.”

Frank, the good husband.

“This leg is a mangled mess,” Maggie interrupted in her severe way as she finished the stitches. “I don’t think it’s broken, but you’ll need to stay off it for a good long while. Your whole body is scraped up, which I’m sure you’re aware of.”

“Stings,” Matt agreed. He was sore as hell, all of his muscles trying to outdo each other with their loud and insistent complaints.

“You’ll need to let these two take care of you,” Maggie said, which sent a little electric jolt between his eyes. He hadn’t actually told Maggie about Frank, about the three of them. He wasn’t sure what conclusions she was drawing from tonight’s scene, but now was not the time to get into it.

“I’m not sure I could move if I tried,” Matt said feebly.

“Good.”

Maggie surveyed him one last time, and then she left the room with Karen at her clacking heels. The two of them spoke in low voices about how to care for his wounds and the proper dosage of his painkillers. It was only then that Matt realized part of his fuzziness was from drugs and not just from the pain. It scared him a little, what the pain might be without them.

Frank was prowling uneasily over the floorboards at his side. When Matt had left the apartment, expecting a fairly routine mission and absolutely nothing like the trap that had been laid for him, Frank had been on his way out, too, on his own routine mission. One of the neighbors had called about a leak. It turned out Frank was handy with odd jobs — so much so that he’d gotten hired as the building’s super, accepting cash under the table to help the tenants with sink clogs and HVAC issues.

Matt was pretty sure everyone in the building knew the Punisher lived on the sixth floor, but they liked him too damn much to ever betray his secret. Matt was also fairly sure his neighbors thought that poor blind lawyer and his pretty blonde wife had no idea that they were sharing their apartment with the Punisher.

But it was unmistakably the Punisher’s voice that Matt heard, low and insistent, when Frank finally spoke.

“You need to tell me everything about these fuckers. The ones who hurt you. Right now.”

Matt sighed. “You’re not going after them. We’ll call the cops, or Jessica and Luke. Not you.”

Frank tsked. “You two got me housebroke again. But I’m still the same old dog, Matthew.”

Hearing his name on Frank’s lips — not Red, not any other nickname — set off a warm buzz at the base of Matt’s neck, even through the pain. It helped him push back against what Frank was saying.

“No. You stopped because you wanted to. Because you were ready for it. We all were,” Matt said. “You shouldn’t give that up. No matter what they do to me.”

Frank shuffled away from the bed and back again, clearly agitated.

“Goddammit. That’s a real pretty speech, but I know you. And right now, you’re lying there thinking you’re a worthless piece of shit who deserved it.” Frank swayed with a restless, frustrated energy. “I oughta kill those sonsabitches, just so you know how I—just so you _know_.”

“Frank.” Matt reached out and curled his hand around Frank’s arm to still him. “You don’t have to prove anything. Not to me.”

“I—” Frank’s breath was shaky and Matt could taste the tiniest trace of salt in the air. He must look pretty rough, for Frank to be so...

“C’mere,” he said, tugging on Frank’s arm, pulling him closer. He tilted his head up, knowing Frank wouldn’t be able to deny him right now, and then Frank’s lips were on his. It hurt — his whole body was a raw wound — but Matt soon felt the pain ebb, shoved back by the intensity that was Frank.

But Matt hadn’t even come close to calming Frank down when he realized something was very wrong. The knowledge that had been hovering in the wings of his consciousness for several minutes finally demanded center stage. He broke away. “Shit.”

“What?”

“Karen.”

Frank straightened up, took a few steps toward the door.

“She’s gone,” Matt said, wincing as he tried to raise himself up, feeling panic wrap around his throat. “She knows everything. She gathered most of the intel on these guys.”

“She got her .380?”

“Of course.”

“Goddammit all to hell,” Frank said, smacking the doorframe.

“I should’ve noticed sooner,” Matt said weakly. “The drugs—they mess with my senses. We—we have to go after her.”

“We?” Frank almost chuckled as he pulled out his phone.

“Nelson,” he said when the call connected. “We got a situation here.” Matt could hear Foggy’s concern on the other end of the line, but the words all smeared together. The drugs and the pain and the frantic fear for Karen were fucking him up. “Yeah, with Karen this time,” Frank continued. “I gotta go after her now. I need you here, most ricky-tick.”

“Frank…” Matt said darkly from the bed. He tried to move his legs, but the pain punched into his stomach so hard he thought he might throw up.

“I’m leaving a loaded pistol on the kitchen table,” Frank said into the phone, ignoring Matt. “This asshole tries to leave the apartment, you shoot him in his good leg, alright?” Frank was moving through the rooms, gathering everything he’d need for an old-school kind of mission. “Good man,” he said to Foggy before hanging up.

Then he was back at Matt’s bedside. “Tell me everything, Red. For her.”

Matt filled him in, as quickly as possible, about the traffickers he and Karen had been tracing for weeks now. When he’d finished, he swallowed hard.

“Please—keep her safe. Whatever you have to do,” he said meaningfully.

“You are such a fucking hypocrite,” Frank said before he headed out into the night.

* * *

Foggy burst into the room only minutes later — or it felt that way to Matt’s hazy brain. But even that small gap without a babysitter had been plenty of time for Matt to get himself into trouble.

“Shit, buddy, what’s going on?”

Matt waited silently while Foggy absorbed the scene for himself. Everything that had been on the table beside the bed was now scattered across the floor, including a water glass that had shattered. The table itself was knocked over on its side. And amid the mess was Matt, lying where he’d crashed when he tried to get up. His forehead was dripping with sweat from the pain of exertion, and his side was dripping with blood from the stitches he’d torn open.

Just waiting in bed had seemed unbearable to Matt, but his legs had found his weight even harder to bear, and he’d gone down for the count. It was enough to make Matt wish Frank had actually delivered a knockout blow before he left. Matt was useless, and even worse than being useless was _knowing_ how useless he was.

“Matty,” Foggy breathed, his heart stutter-stepping as he crunched through the glass. And then began the painstaking process of returning Matt to his prison of a bed — first using a bandage to stanch the bleeding and then lifting him up, with Matt forced to cling to Foggy like a child. The upward journey could be measured easily in inches and yet it felt like miles. And all the while Matt’s brain whirled around and around and around. _Let me go, let me go, I have to go_. But he couldn’t do shit.

“I’m sending Brett after them,” Foggy said once he’d settled Matt back into bed. “Tell me where they are.”

“No,” Matt choked out. “If the police see Frank....It’s too risky.”

“Fine,” Foggy said, and he left the room, the fine shards of glass clinging to his shoes and tinkling icily over the floor. He was back seconds later, a chunk of cold metal clasped in his overheated hand.

Matt smiled thinly. “You’re not gonna shoot me, Fog.”

“You think? You think I wouldn’t put a bullet someplace non-lethal? Jesus, Matt, you clearly almost got yourself killed tonight. A longer recovery time would mean a longer wait to finish the job.”

“I didn’t mean to—” Matt swallowed. “You know you can’t do it.”

“OK, you’re right, I could never hurt you. But you’re going to tell me where they are anyway. It’s _Karen_.”

Matt knew Foggy was right. Frank had gotten himself out of innumerable sticky situations with the law before, and if there was any chance that—

“Karen got information about a shipment arriving tonight,” he said haltingly. “I’m not even going to tell you what it was, because it’s honestly better not to know. Our tip sent me to the wrong place. It was a trap.”

They’d thought they were being so clever with their carefully cultivated source, but somehow they’d been outmatched. Obviously, Scharlach hadn’t become one of the most powerful traffickers in North America without a few tricks up his sleeve.

“There’s one other place it might be coming in,” Matt said, naming one of the docks. “And Karen knows Scharlach was planning to leave tonight by the same boat.”

“You guys were after fucking Scharlach?” Foggy’s voice was more weary than angry as he started dialing his phone.

Matt didn’t know what he expected after Foggy finished talking to Brett. But it wasn’t for Foggy to pull a chair through the mess at the side of the bed, sit down and take his hand.

Things between them had been — not strained exactly, but _different_ in the last few months. Matt knew Foggy didn’t understand the thing with Frank, at least not yet. It made him uncomfortable, given Frank’s past, and to complicate matters, it made Foggy the odd avocado out. Matt and Karen had a new, intense partnership that wasn’t Nelson, Murdock & Page. Matt didn’t think there was any actual jealousy involved — Marci made Foggy a very happy man — but it was definitely a sea change.

But there was no hint of any of that in the warm pressure of Foggy’s hand on his. “Do you want to say some prayers?” Foggy asked softly. “I don’t really know any, but you can tell me what to say.”

Matt squeezed his best friend’s hand and began to pray.

* * *

The time crawled by physically, like tiny insect legs worrying his skin, each minute itching. Eventually, he couldn’t even pray anymore. He let the room drift from him, existing somewhere in between his breaths, aware that Foggy was cleaning up the glass and righting the table and sitting back down and standing back up, restlessly, over and over, but also not noticing at all.

He thought of the way Karen’s hair smelled drying in the sun, and the way Frank sounded when he laughed, really laughed, and he tried not to think of the way Frank’s blood smelled drying on his skin, and the way Karen sounded when she was in pain, really in pain. He wanted so desperately for them to come back, and he also wanted them never to come back — to get in Karen’s car or that van that Frank still kept parked somewhere in the city and just drive, until they were so far away nothing could touch them. He couldn’t touch them.

He was imagining them living somewhere warm, with a beach and a dog and a soft bed to hold them, when all at once they were there in the room.

They were alive. They were safe. They were home.

An emotional Foggy hugged them — both of them — and Matt was almost glad he couldn’t move, because it was too much, to think of touching them himself. Their voices were an underwater blur around him, until he heard Karen’s tentative steps approaching the bed.

“Matt? Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” he said automatically. “What—what did you do?”

“We stopped them. The NYPD arrested Scharlach tonight.” There was a note of triumph in her voice that unnerved him.

“What if the police hadn’t shown up? You shouldn’t have gone after him alone.”

“I had to. It was my fault that you—” She took a deep breath. “I didn’t want them to get away with what they did. And I was trying not to drag Frank into this.”

“What was your plan?”

“To stall Scharlach. Stop him from leaving on that boat. Which I did.”

Matt nodded once, a clammy, sick feeling sliding up from his gut that had nothing to do with his pain. “How many?” he asked, needing to know and also knowing that he’d accept any number. That he’d swallow their sins — take them away and make them part of his own flesh. “How many are…?”

“Dead?” Frank asked, stepping closer. “Not a one. ’Course you’d think that. Fuck.”

“Frank, no. I’m the one who told you—”

“And I told _you_ it doesn’t work like that. You don’t wanna cross that line.”

“But you were wrong. You said there’s no coming back from it. But you did. You’re here.”

Frank huffed out a breath. “Ain’t so easy getting rid of me, I guess.”

“Who’s trying?” Karen asked, squeezing his arm.

Frank kissed her forehead. “I’m gonna see our buddy Franklin home. You get some rest.” His hand ruffled through Matt’s hair — the first touch, featherlight and fleeting. “Both of you.”

* * *

Matt drowsed uneasily as Karen got ready for bed. He frowned when she started pouring out a dose of his meds, but he took them without complaining. He needed to talk to her, alone, and the pain was growing sharp enough to steal his focus.

She clambered carefully over the cool acres of their big bed and laid down next to him, not too close, but still radiating heat over the silk sheets. He could sense her eyes taking him in and slowly filling with tears. “Matt, I’m so sorry—” she began, but he cut her off.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “I trusted the tip as much as you did. But what you did tonight… You shouldn’t risk your life for me. Not ever.”

“It wasn’t just for—” She stopped mid-protest. “I had to do something.”

“But you have Frank to think of now,” Matt said imploringly. “He’d be lost without you.”

“And I’d be lost without you. I know, I’ve been there,” she said thickly.

“Karen…”

“I told Frank on our first night together that he couldn’t come between us. Don’t make a liar out of me now.”

“He’s...better. At all of this. He’s better for you.”

She grazed her fingers over his wrist, and Matt managed to refrain from wincing so she wouldn't pull away. It wasn’t the pain, it was just—he needed her, and her touch reminded him exactly how much.

“Matt, I love you for being _you_ ,” she said. “I love Frank for being Frank, but he could never replace you.” Her hand curled over his. “Besides, you’re better at this stuff than you think. Do you know how many times you’ve brought me a blanket before I realized I was cold? And if you take those back rubs of yours away from me, I’m going to have to sue you for intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

The tiniest of smiles fought its way to his lips.

“I want to kiss you but I’m afraid of hurting you.”

“Do it anyway,” Matt said huskily.

She pressed her lips to his, more gently than he wanted, but he reveled in it anyway, in the way it spread a warmth as thick as honey slowly through him, soothing all his broken parts.

“I love you, Mr. Murdock,” she said, and he smiled again, knowing the answer she was expecting.

“I love you, Mrs. Murdock,” he said quietly, a happy pain stabbing through his chest. Karen hadn’t taken his name after they got married. She wanted to keep her own — both for herself and for the brother who wouldn’t get to carry it on. But this exchange had been a little private ritual between them until Frank moved in and it felt too much like leaving him out. Tonight, Matt knew, she meant it as a reminder of what she’d chosen, even before Frank was around to sweeten the deal.

They lay silently next to each other until Matt heard a distinctive pair of boots ringing on the stairs.

“Frank’s back,” he murmured. “I bet you anything he’ll try to sleep on the couch.”

“Maybe not a bad idea, with you hurt like this. You need space.”

Matt shook his head.

“I’ll go talk to him,” Karen said as the front door opened.

It was useless, of course. Frank absolutely refused to sleep where he might jostle Matt’s injuries. Instead, he sat down in the chair that Foggy had left next to the bed.

Frank took Matt’s hand, and Karen curled up at his side. And there, surrounded by warmth, by scent, by breath, he was too overwhelmed to do anything but rest. There was no singing. No river. Just the drumming of their hearts, in perfect rhythm with his own.

**Author's Note:**

> The Catholic funeral classic (and Sunday staple) "On Eagle's Wings" was written by Michael Joncas and is largely based on Psalm 91.


End file.
